How Yelp Is A “Necessary Evil” Again In VetMed
Back in 2020, we told you your Yelp page was probably unclaimed, and you didn’t know it. Plenty of practice owners read that, shrugged, and moved on. Yelp was the platform veterinarians loved to hate, and nobody was going to lose sleep over it.
Six years later, Yelp is back on the list of things you can’t ignore. Not because Yelp got better. Because ChatGPT started reading it.
Yelp is now what ChatGPT trusts most for local answers
In July, Yelp signed a licensing deal with OpenAI. ChatGPT can now pull Yelp reviews, ratings, photos, and business details directly into its answers, with Yelp branding and links attached. Yelp’s Request a Quote feature is coming to ChatGPT, too, which means a pet parent could book an appointment without ever visiting your website.
The effect showed up in the data almost immediately. BrightLocal just published a study of nearly 2 million AI citations across 116,000 domains, and for ChatGPT specifically, Yelp was the number one source by a mile: 99,281 citations, cited in 80% of ChatGPT’s local answers. The next closest source, TripAdvisor, had about a tenth of that.
Google Business Profile, the listing you’ve spent years polishing? It doesn’t crack ChatGPT’s top ten.
For veterinary searches, Yelp is one of only two sources that matter
BrightLocal broke the data out by industry, and the veterinary numbers are stark.
Google Business Profile drove 59.2% of AI citations for vet practices. Yelp drove 19.5%. Facebook was a distant third at 4.3%, and everything after that (MapQuest, Scratchpay, Healthy Paws, Vetstoria, Apple Maps) was under 1%.
Put another way: nearly four out of five times an AI tool cites a source about a veterinary hospital, that source is Google or Yelp. And Yelp showed up for every single one of the 38 practices in the veterinary sample, same as Google.
Yelp’s share among vets (19.5%) is also higher than among dentists (15.4%), plumbers (13.8%), or lawyers (7.9%). Pet parents ask AI where to take their dog, and AI reaches for Yelp.
Why this hurts more for veterinary practices
Here’s the problem. In our 2020 Veterinary Marketing Benchmark Report, 45% of hospitals had unclaimed Yelp pages. That number was driven by a policy Yelp still enforces today: if nobody logs into your Yelp for Business account for 90 days, Yelp strips the verified status and reverts your page to an unclaimed public listing. No warning, no grace period. Just a login gap.
An unclaimed page still exists. It still has your name, your address, and whatever reviews people have left. What it doesn’t have is anything you’ve contributed: no current hours, no accurate services, no photos you chose, no responses to the two-star review from 2022, and no control over the phone number ChatGPT is about to hand a prospective client.
So when someone asks ChatGPT “which vet near me handles exotics” or “who’s open Saturday for an emergency,” the answer gets built from a page you’ve never looked at. Google would at least give you a chance to correct that through your Business Profile. ChatGPT, right now, mostly won’t.
“Necessary evil” is the right phrase
We’re not going to tell you to love Yelp. The review filtering is opaque, the ad sales calls are relentless, and the user base still skews toward the coasts.
But a necessary evil is still necessary. Yelp is the second-largest source of AI information about your hospital, the largest source for the fastest-growing AI assistant, and it’s licensed its data to Apple Maps and Yahoo on top of that. Every one of those channels reads the same page. Neglecting it now means neglecting it everywhere at once.
The good news is that the bar is low. You don’t need a Yelp strategy. You need a claimed, accurate, occasionally touched page.
What to do this week
Search your hospital on Yelp. If you see “Claim this business,” start there. If you claimed it years ago, log in and make sure it’s still yours.
Then fix the basics: hours, phone number, address, website link, and the services you actually offer. Add a handful of current photos of the building and the team. Respond to the most recent reviews, good and bad, in a couple of sentences each.
Finally, put a recurring reminder on someone’s calendar. The 90-day clock resets every time you log in, so a monthly login with a quick update keeps the page claimed and keeps the information AI is quoting from you, not from a page frozen in 2019.
That’s the whole job. Roughly an hour, then twenty minutes a quarter, to make sure the second-most-cited source about your practice is telling the truth.
If you’d rather have someone handle it alongside the rest of your listings, our Marketing Suite manages Yelp, Google Business Profile, and the rest of your directory presence so the information AI finds is the information you want it to find. Book a demo or call 503-765-6030.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, “ChatGPT gains access to Yelp reviews, ratings, and photos” (July 23, 2026): https://searchengineland.com/openai-yelp-deal-483326
- BrightLocal, “Top sources and directories for local AI search” (Aug 26, 2026): https://www.brightlocal.com/resources/ai-directory-sources/
- iVET360, “Surprise! Your YELP Page Is Now Unclaimed” (2020): https://ivet360.com/surprise-your-yelp-page-is-now-unclaimed/
- Yelp for Business, “What is a claimed business?”: https://www.yelp-support.com/article/What-is-a-claimed-business?l=en_US